BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I don't buy your premise that there's going to be a civil war.

BOB GARFIELD: This was President Bush on Tuesday with Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News. [INDISTINGUISHABLE VOICES]

PRESIDENT BUSH: As you know, we've reduced troop levels this year, and that's because our commanders on the ground have said that the security situation in Iraq is improving because the Iraqis are more capable of taking the fight.

BOB GARFIELD: The security situation in Iraq has improved, the President of the United States says, an interesting analysis, following, as it does, the most deadly week of sectarian violence since the fall of Saddam Hussein. But as to the question the President was addressing, whether Iraq is verging on civil war, at least we can confidently mark him down for "no." There are, however, other opinions on the subject.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let's just start with Iraq. Give me your definition of where Iraq is right now. Is it in a civil war?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: If you've got something like a civil war happening over there in Iraq - [OVERTALK]

REPORTER: Is this the making of a civil war, or is all this civil war talk made up by the media?

BOB GARFIELD: The nature of the conflict in Iraq, its trajectory and just what to call it were the media questions of the week. As has been the case since long before the US-led invasion, the battles on the ground have been paralleled by battles of semantics. Stanford University Professor James D. Fearon is co-author of Ethnicity, Insurgency and Civil War.

JAMES D. FEARON: It looks like, by recent estimates you know, at least 20,000 Iraqis killed in fighting since we invaded, and probably more like 25 or 30,000. But even if you said 15,000, we'd be talking about, in comparative terms, a quite intense civil war.

BOB GARFIELD: This is not a novel formulation. Jonathan Landay, defense and intelligence correspondent for the Knight Ridder newspapers in Washington, says that before the war, many in the intelligence community contemplated that very scenario, and today regard it as having come to pass, or at least, to the very brink.

JONATHAN LANDAY: One of those people is the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the top military intelligence agency, General Maples, who'd said as much to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week in testimony. What he said was that the conditions for a civil war exist, but they don't believe that a civil war is actually raging at the moment.

BOB GARFIELD: The question is where does the brink end and the catastrophic realization begin? The Washington Post, for one, has been cautious in its language. In a Tuesday story, it cited a body count of 1,300, directly attributable to sectarian violence, but stopped short of drawing linguistic conclusions. Keith Richburg is the Post's foreign editor.

KEITH RICHBURG: Yeah, I just think you have to be very careful when you throw these terms around. It's obviously sectarian violence. It's obviously getting worse. But we're not quite sure if civil war would be too strong a term. We tend to think it is just at the moment, since there are large sections of the country where there is no violence occurring. I mean, most of these executions we see are occurring in Baghdad and the four provinces around Baghdad. And you go into many large cities in Iraq - Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriyah, Basra - and you're not going to see people openly fighting on the street. So I think civil war to most people would conjure up something on a broader and more continuous scale than what we're seeing in Iraq now.

GEORGE PACKER: It's setting the bar pretty high, isn't it?

BOB GARFIELD: New Yorker magazine staff writer George Packer is author of The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

GEORGE PACKER: Every province has to be embroiled in the levels of violence that Baghdad is in right now before we can [LAUGHS] trot out the term and admit that it's a civil war? I mean, the south is pretty violent too. How many more corpses do there have to be before you're willing to call it a civil war?

BOB GARFIELD: You could say, "what's the difference what the thing is called, the violence is what it is, and everything else is just word play." But word play is not irrelevant. So acutely aware is Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of the politics of nomenclature, that his Pentagon press briefings have been an ongoing war against word choice. At one time, he bristled at the term "insurgency," dismissing violent attacks in Iraq as the work of a few "dead-enders." Later, he complained that the term "guerilla" imputed too much legitimacy to the bad guys.

DONALD RUMSFELD: I mean, my goodness, I don't think it's a guerilla war. You may think so. I don't know if anyone at this table thinks so. It's an insurgency.

BOB GARFIELD: Oh, so it is an insurgency. Oh, wait a minute. No it's not, as Joint Chiefs Chairman General Peter Pace discovered last fall, when he accidentally let the "I" word slip in front of the Secretary.

PETER PACE: Many times with the Iraqi armed forces in the lead, taking cities from the - [PAUSE] I have to use the word "insurgent" 'cause I can't think of a better word right now - [CHUCKLES IN BACKGROUND] - to take, take a- [OVERLAPPING VOICES]

SECRETARY RUMSFELD: -- the enemies of the Iraqi, legitimate Iraqi government. How's that? [LAUGHTER]

PETER PACE: What the - what the Secretary said.

BOB GARFIELD: But beyond the petty cynicism of political spin, says The New Yorker's George Packer, word choice can inform people's understanding of the underlying reality, not just in international public opinion but to the Iraqis themselves.

GEORGE PACKER: To them, it was a dread term because it creates an atmosphere in which people feel they have to reach for their gun and their group in order to protect themselves. And the use of the term can actually accelerate the violence by creating that kind of social psychosis, which each group really does feel there's an existential threat, and it has to strike first or else it will be annihilated. That's the dynamic that sets countries into this downward spiral of a civil war, and it's partly a linguistic logic.

BOB GARFIELD: Even for the Bush Administration, the term "civil war" raises basic policy issues far beyond a few Rumsfeldian quibbles.

GEORGE PACKER: If we're fighting an insurgency to defend a legitimately elected government, that's both morally and strategically a pretty clear position to be in. If we are there in large numbers in a country that is falling into civil war at its early stages, it's much harder to tell people back home, as well as soldiers, why we're there.

BOB GARFIELD: Harder to explain to the home front and harder to justify before history, because in the end it matters little whether the hostilities in Iraq are more like Lebanon in the '80s or Yugoslavia in the '90s or the Horn of Africa right now. What matters is what's happening and who is to blame.

GEORGE PACKER: Because our project in Iraq evolved into becoming a democratic, unified Iraq that would provide something like a wedge to change the politics of the Middle East. A civil war in Iraq goes in just the opposite direction, and it becomes a strategic problem for years and years. And not least for me, it becomes a moral disaster, because we've left Iraqis in the worst possible state when we had responsibility. And if Iraq has become a civil war, it's a complete failure.

BOB GARFIELD: President Bush says he believes otherwise. The leaders of Iraq's warring factions told him -

PRESIDENT BUSH: - that we've got to make a choice, if we're going to have sectarian strife or whether or not we're going to unify. And I heard loud and clear that they understand that they're going to choose unification.

BOB GARFIELD: That's what he heard, but words are slippery beasts. Sometimes they wriggle out of your hands and out of control. It wasn't so long ago, after all, that the President landed a fighter plane on an aircraft carrier under the banner of an apparently unambiguous term. Mission accomplished. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]